Rabbi Meir Kahane
From the dummy debate with Michael Lerner
I have never seen such open anti-Semitism in this country since World War II as I have seen today. It is open. The slightest problem - it comes out in black and white. I’m warning you, do not ever listen to your Jewish leaders who say, It couldn’t happen here, this isn’t Germany. Of course this isn’t Germany, but neither Germany was Germany always. In Germany they used to tell people that this isn’t Poland. Every country has its way. Nobody loved their country as much as the Jews in Germany did.
Nobody felt as German as did the Jews of Germany. They didn’t even call themselves Jews, they called themselves Germans of the Mosaic faith. They loved Germany with a passion that no one here could ever feel. Germany had a Jewish Foreign Minister in 1922. America didn’t have a Jewish Secretary of State until 1972, and it was only because he fled Germany. If someone would have asked a Jew, any Jew in the world in 1920, Who is the worst of anti-Semites? not one would have said, Germans. They would have said, Poles, and Slovaks, and Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, and Romanians, and Hungarians.
Germans were the best, cultured. And then it happened. It did not happen because Germans are different. They are not different. Jews visit Poland today. Are you crazy? You’re spending money there? Their hands are red with Jewish blood, what do you want to see in Poland? Give them the cemetery. I want money to go to Jewish life and not for Jewish death. It happened in Germany not because they are any different, it happened because there was a terrible economic collapse. People not only lost jobs, but they lost hope. People who lose hope will follow anyone who offers them hope. That’s what happened, and you want to tell me it couldn’t happen here?
Your problem is that your local Jewish leaders are these losers. It’s incredible who is chosen to be a leader, ignoramuses. They’re not chosen for their scholarship, their knowledge, their piety. They’re chosen for their money and their ability to raise money. They don’t know what people think about Jews. They sit at dinners, and banquets, national conferences of Christians and Jews. And they sit and exchange conversation and humor and joke, and plaques. “This here is your plaque and this is my plaque.” There is only one place where people can find out what people really think about Jews, and that’s in a bar,
a neighborhood working class bar, not a trendy bar over here in downtown San Francisco. Even if it is a happy one. A working class bar, that’s where the Schnapps go in and that’s where you hear what comes out. That’s where you hear America saying, the jealousy, the Jews own this, and the Jews, - that’s when times are good. God forbid if there should be an economic collapse in this country, God forbid it would be the Jews who are blamed. Michael, the Jews. Not the Blacks, because the anti-Semites blame the Jews for everything, including the Blacks. The tragedy of our time is that Jews don’t want to see it.
It is on top of us and we don’t want to see it. A country with the deficit of over two trillion dollars, the biggest debtor in the world. If the Japanese would someday lose faith in the dollar, and stop covering our debts here, there goes the ballgame.
There is no relationship between Wall Street and the real world. The biggest gambling joint north of New Jersey. The economy here is in terrible, terrible shape. We’re losing jobs, we’re losing trades, we’re losing everything. And you sit there… Think carefully, especially young people.
Go home, go home. If you’re in college, this summer go to Israel. Who says every Jew has to be a PhD? Where does it say that? Why is it that every Jew has to be a doctor, an attorney? Where? Go to Israel, enroll in a yeshiva. If you don’t like it, quit, if you do like it, stay. And learn a trade, learn to work with your hands. Plant a tree in Judea somewhere, be a farmer, get married and have a dozen babies. Every one of those children is a gem to us, we owe Hitler two million babies. Pay him back, in this case interest is allowed. And then thirty years from now when you are sitting in your Jewish state, with your grandchildren
in a settlement which has now become a town, and you speak to them how it was when you first came and how difficult, they’ll look up at you and tell you in Hebrew, What a grandfather, what a grandmother. Then you’ll know what Jewish happiness is. Go home, go home. We don’t need money, we need Jews.
